Peru’s Tourist Curse

Anine Kriegler follows the tourist trail in a nation trapped in the past.

Through the window of the tour bus, you could just catch the graffiti sprawled on the wall of yet another decaying building: ‘Capitalismo = explotación, degradación y muerte’. The guide desperately directed our attention to the Spanish cathedral on the other side of the bus. He later claimed he had not seen the writing and could not imagine what it might mean.

After almost two weeks in Peru, I was an unexceptional tourist in knowing absolutely nothing about it. Not its minimum wage (U.S. $156 per month), its poverty level (43 per cent below the poverty line), or even its president’s name (Alan Garcia). Of course, I could tell you all about the 14 Incas and the date of the Spanish arrival that ended their reign (1532), the altitude of Machupicchu (about 2400m) and the name of the best Irish pub in Cusco (it’s Paddy’s and yes, there are two). Despite every attempt at an ‘authentic’ experience, I flew away with nothing but history, tourist lore and a knitted alpaca hat that my friends will never let me wear.

Tourism accounts for less than six percent of the Peruvian GDP (as opposed to 7.1 per cent in South Africa), but this statistic masks the dependence of certain environmentally breathtaking but otherwise economically bleak regions on tourism-generated employment. During the high season there are often more tourists than locals in the town of Cusco, and a walk down any street is an endless series of hostels, curio shops, camera specialists, micro-museums, laundromats, tour operators and currency exchange centres.

It is a region that exists only for the dreadlocked American college students on spring break, Australian adventure-seekers and middle-aged Swedes (hoping to tick another site off the Seven Wonders list before they die) that throng its streets. It is thus hardly surprising that every building imitates Inca architecture, every painting is a reproduction and every trinket that the chorus of dusty children’s voices thrusts at you with that relentless, heart-rending ‘Amiga, amiga! Iss very cheap, amiga. Please amiga. Please…’, is one you could imagine buying there 500 years ago.

These ‘old ways’ are clung to for the sake of tourism, which provides that much needed employment, but they also stifle the development of ‘new ways’. There is no drive to change, to be at the forefront, to explore new avenues and opportunities. In short, so many of these destinations packed with cultural curiosities exist in a present built entirely in the past, with no observable enthusiasm for an alternative future.

It seems it is the curse of those who travel far away to find themselves either in the past or right where they started. If you’re not being shepherded around a museum or ruin by an anxious local guide, you’re eating pizza surrounded by unnaturally loud tourists or staying in a hotel which, besides the inevitable toilet troubles, someone has gone to great expense to make just like home.

A holiday visit to another country, as opposed to a business trip, is often a trip through time rather than through space. Time spent in tourist Peru is time spent in a tacky reflection of the 16th century. Similarly, a tourist in South Africa will probably find themselves either around 1900 or the 1960s; in Egypt, it’ll be 2000 BC. The idea is presumably that these are histories and cultures worth preserving, but it may also be the case that this is at the expense of those trying to create fresh histories and cultures for the 21st century.

Remarkably, the appearance of authenticity is sufficient in the tourism trade. Tiny wrinkled women in red-trimmed skirts and long braids wander the streets of Peruvian tourist towns, offering themselves and their brightly adorned llamas to the tourist camera in exchange for small change just as their distant ancestors offered human and llama lives to the Gods in exchange for rain. They do not dress this way at home, but wear the outfit by necessity, just as they have done since it was first imposed by the Spanish in accordance with the European fashions of the time.

But it is a more insidious, more frivolous and altogether more twisted kind of colonialism that now shapes the lives of many in the ‘ethnically interesting’ third world. The tourist’s demand is worse than a misguided concept of civilisation and development; it is lack of development. To be worthy of a visit is to be as close as possible to the same as you were as long as possible ago.

Wealthy travellers would have no reason to tour Vietnamese villages, African townships, Latin American slums or Indian forts if these places were not so poor as to depend on their interest and be willing to pose nicely for the sake of a good photo. One little boy got so carried away by the sight of a camera being passed around that he spontaneously squealed ‘Photo! Photo!’ and wriggled until he was in danger of coming off his mother’s back. Once the lens was on him, however, his face froze into a parody of that distant pensiveness that looks so good in sepia and allows the returned traveller to wax lyrical about the depth of character and ‘organic spirituality’ of the local people.

Independent socio-economic development would be of no use to the foreigners who come precisely for this image. They come to eat deep-fried guinea pig (not recommended) for under two dollars. They come to buy hand-woven wall hangings that took a woman three weeks to make in a mountain weaving village in which there are no men except those too old or sick to be porters on the Inca Trail.

And so the progressive, social-minded, humanitarian types among us return home from these exotic destinations, smug with our cultural sensitivity and respect for diverse ethnicities, but ultimately guilty of placing the most stifling restriction of all on those we have left behind us. We curse them with being eternally and inescapably quaint.

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Anine Kriegler is in her third year of a degree in politics and economics.

This article was first published in Vol III, Issue 1 of The Cape Town Globalist, May 2008.